TXTZ to Markdown

Nothing you choose here leaves your browser, and nothing is downloaded to make it work — not a library, not a reader, nothing. A .txtz is a ZIP with text in it, and your browser already knows how to inflate.

…or drop one anywhere on this page.

The text as a Markdown file, with what it says about itself.

If the archive's metadata says the text is Markdown then this is a rename — it already was, and pretending otherwise would mean re-formatting something that needed nothing. If it says plain, the page says so, because plain text saved as .md is still plain text and calling it Markdown does not make headings appear.

What a .txtz actually is

A ZIP with the text inside it. calibre writes index.txt — or index.text when the text is Textile — with a metadata.opf beside it and any pictures under images/. Rename one to .zip and anything will open it.

It does not say what its own text is, except in one place

Nothing about a .txt inside a ZIP tells you whether it is meant to be plain text, Markdown or Textile, and the three want to be treated quite differently. calibre solved that by appending an element to the metadata that no specification has:

<text-formatting>markdown</text-formatting>

That is calibre telling calibre, and it is the only thing in the file that says. This page reads it and tells you what it found, rather than looking at the text and guessing — because a line starting with a hash is a heading in one of those three and a line starting with a hash in the other two.

Its metadata is the old OPF, not the one in an EPUB

calibre writes this file with to_opf1(), so the title is <dc:Title> with a capital T where an EPUB would say <dc:title>. A reader that knows only the modern spelling finds nothing and reports a book with no title — which looks like a file missing its metadata rather than like a reader looking in the wrong place. Both spellings are tried here, in that order.

What it will not do

Where to go next